Earth Babies

By Sally Cameron

I fell pregnant while we were living in England so I started to look for information on homebirths and natural products in the UK. This led me to discover wonderful natural parenting products available overseas. Rachel was later born at home in Pretoria, South Africa. When I looked for products similar to those that I had seen in the UK, I couldn’t find anything, and yet I was sure that there must be other parents in South Africa who were also interested in the kind of products I was looking for.

I met Barbara at antenatal classes and when we spent time together after the birth of our children, she saw that I was using cloth nappies that I had brought back home from England. She was interested in them and in the other ideas that I had, and so we decided to start the company Earth Babies to provide these products here in South Africa.

We both had very small babies at this point but slowly we managed to resource fabric and design patterns for our products. After our first few strange looking nappies, we came up with a design that we liked and started making cloth nappies to sell, usually at night once our babies were asleep. This was very time consuming and involved many late night hours at the sewing machine. Husbands were even called in to help sew when times were busy. We gradually added more designs and products to our range but as we grew we realised that we could not keep up with making the nappies ourselves. We now have a small CMT factory in Pretoria helping us and it has really lifted an enormous burden.

We decided that our company should be an internet-based site so that it could be accessed by parents around the country, and products could be posted countrywide. It also helped to keep out overheads low. We followed the treads of similar types of companies in USA and UK where natural parenting Internet companies are prolific. South Africa is catching up fast with regards to Internet usage and e-commerce so we feel that we have positioned ourselves in an emerging market. Since we started our company, quite a few cloth nappy companies have come onto the market in South Africa.

We did not however want our company to focus purely on our products. We really wanted a large part of what we did to be about supporting mothers and giving them information about more natural approaches to parenting. It was only through other people sharing their ideas with us that we learnt about things like cloth nappies, elimination communication, extended breastfeeding, natural and home births. We, in turn, wanted to make the information available to others and so a large part of our Internet site is dedicated to articles and information about these topics. We also made a forum available on our website where parents can chat to each other, share ideas, and support one another in pregnancy, birth and parenting.

Barbara and I both want to be work at home moms. It is not always easy to balance working and mothering, but we just have to keep evaluating what our initial goals were and stick to that. The temptation to try and compete with larger companies and to grow too fast has been there, but this would mean a lot less time with our children, who remain our number one focus.

Barbara – “ I have always dreamed of being a mom, the reality of which has been more wonderful, more challenging and more time consuming than I could ever have imagined. I hope that Earth Babies can reach other moms on this amazing journey and somehow make it a little easier for them."

Sally - “I always knew that my dream job was out there and that I just had not found it yet. Who would have known that it would be owning my own company and being able to help other parents. Barbara and I joke now that we should have studied business and computers to do this job but I know that my background in nursing and midwifery has helped us, as has Barbara’s experience in the restaurant industry as an administrator and personal assistant. We feel like quite small fish is the big ocean but we will be the best most colourful fish we can be.”